Salesforce, the business software maker, has agreed to buy Cresta, a company whose AI voice agents answer customers' phone calls. Salesforce announced the deal on Monday, Nov. 2, and did not give a price. It agreed to pay $2.7 billion, according to a news report that cites a person familiar with the deal. The report says Cresta was valued at $1.6 billion in 2022.
An AI agent is software that can carry out tasks on its own instead of only answering questions. A voice agent is one built to hold a spoken conversation, here on a customer service phone line. Salesforce says Cresta's agents hold real-time conversations with callers, cope with interruptions and handle complex calls from start to finish. It names Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines among the brands that use them. Cresta's software also coaches human customer service workers during their calls and analyzes every conversation, Salesforce says.
Salesforce plans to combine Cresta with Service Cloud, its customer service software. Salesforce says that together with Service Cloud, businesses will be able to link what is said on each call to the customer's history and to what the call achieves, such as a solved problem, a customer who stays or a sale. Salesforce says that after the deal closes, Cresta will keep working with the call center and phone systems its customers already use.
The deal adds to a run of purchases. In September, Salesforce completed its purchase of Fin, the company formerly called Intercom, whose AI agent answers customers by chat, email, text and phone, Salesforce says. Salesforce agreed in June to pay about $3.6 billion for it. In October, it agreed to buy Braze, whose software sends brands' messages to customers by app, email and text, in a deal Salesforce puts at about $5.66 billion in enterprise value. A news report says the deal builds up Salesforce's customer service business, which faces competition from startups such as Sierra, led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor.
Cresta began as a project in Stanford University's AI lab and was founded in 2017 by Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist who pioneered several AI projects at Google, with Tim Shi and Zayd Enam, according to the news report.
Salesforce expects the deal to close in the first quarter of its 2028 fiscal year, if regulators approve it. Neither company has said whether Cresta's prices will change, or how many calls its agents handle without a person stepping in.